Theory and Practice of Data Citation

Citations are the cornerstone of knowledge propagation and the primary means of assessing the quality of research, as well as directing investments in science. Science is increasingly becoming "data-intensive", where large volumes of data are collected and analyzed to discover complex patterns through simulations and experiments, and most scientific reference works have been replaced by online curated datasets. Yet, given a dataset, there is no quantitative, consistent and established way of knowing how it has been used over time, who contributed to its curation, what results have been yielded or what value it has. The development of a theory and practice of data citation is fundamental for considering data as first-class research objects with the same relevance and centrality of traditional scientific products. Many works in recent years have discussed data citation from different viewpoints: illustrating why data citation is needed, defining the principles and outlining recommendations for data citation systems, and providing computational methods for addressing specific issues of data citation. The current panorama is many-faceted and an overall view that brings together diverse aspects of this topic is still missing. Therefore, this paper aims to describe the lay of the land for data citation, both from the theoretical (the why and what) and the practical (the how) angle.Comment: 24 pages, 2 tables, pre-print accepted in Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST), 201

Web API Fragility: How Robust is Your Web API Client

Web APIs provide a systematic and extensible approach for application-to-application interaction. A large number of mobile applications makes use of web APIs to integrate services into apps. Each Web API's evolution pace is determined by their respective developer and mobile application developers are forced to accompany the API providers in their software evolution tasks. In this paper we investigate whether mobile application developers understand and how they deal with the added distress of web APIs evolving. In particular, we studied how robust 48 high profile mobile applications are when dealing with mutated web API responses. Additionally, we interviewed three mobile application developers to better understand their choices and trade-offs regarding web API integration.Comment: Technical repor

BlogForever: D3.1 Preservation Strategy Report

This report describes preservation planning approaches and strategies recommended by the BlogForever project as a core component of a weblog repository design. More specifically, we start by discussing why we would want to preserve weblogs in the first place and what it is exactly that we are trying to preserve. We further present a review of past and present work and highlight why current practices in web archiving do not address the needs of weblog preservation adequately. We make three distinctive contributions in this volume: a) we propose transferable practical workflows for applying a combination of established metadata and repository standards in developing a weblog repository, b) we provide an automated approach to identifying significant properties of weblog content that uses the notion of communities and how this affects previous strategies, c) we propose a sustainability plan that draws upon community knowledge through innovative repository design

A JBI Information Object Engineering Environment Utilizing Metadata Fragments for Refining Searches on Semantically-Related Object Types

The Joint Battlespace Infosphere (JBI) architecture defines the Information Object (IO) as its basic unit of data. This research proposes an IO engineering methodology that will introduce componentized IO type development. This enhancement will improve the ability of JBI users to create and store IO type schemas, and query and subscribe to information objects, which may be semantically related by their inclusion of common metadata elements. Several parallel efforts are being explored to enable efficient storage and retrieval of IOs. Utilizing relational database access methods, applying a component-based IO type development concept, and exploiting XML inclusion mechanisms, this research improves the means by which a JBI can deliver related IO types to subscribers from a single query or subscription. The proposal of this new IO type architecture also integrates IO type versioning, type coercion, and namespacing standards into the methodology. The combined proposed framework provides a better means by which a JBI can deliver the right information to the right users at the right time

CRISTAL: A practical study in designing systems to cope with change

Software engineers frequently face the challenge of developing systems whose requirements are likely to change in order to adapt to organizational reconfigurations or other external pressures. Evolving requirements present difficulties, especially in environments in which business agility demands shorter development times and responsive prototyping. This paper uses a study from CERN in Geneva to address these research questions by employing a 'description-driven' approach that is responsive to changes in user requirements and that facilitates dynamic system reconfiguration. The study describes how handling descriptions of objects in practice alongside their instances (making the objects self-describing) can mediate the effects of evolving user requirements on system development. This paper reports on and draws lessons from the practical use of a description-driven system over time. It also identifies lessons that can be learned from adopting such a self-describing description-driven approach in future software development. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd

Annotation-based storage and retrieval of models and simulation descriptions in computational biology

This work aimed at enhancing reuse of computational biology models by identifying and formalizing relevant meta-information. One type of meta-information investigated in this thesis is experiment-related meta-information attached to a model, which is necessary to accurately recreate simulations. The main results are: a detailed concept for model annotation, a proposed format for the encoding of simulation experiment setups, a storage solution for standardized model representations and the development of a retrieval concept.Die vorliegende Arbeit widmete sich der besseren Wiederverwendung biologischer Simulationsmodelle. Ziele waren die Identifikation und Formalisierung relevanter Modell-Meta-Informationen, sowie die Entwicklung geeigneter Modellspeicherungs- und Modellretrieval-Konzepte. Wichtigste Ergebnisse der Arbeit sind ein detailliertes Modellannotationskonzept, ein Formatvorschlag für standardisierte Kodierung von Simulationsexperimenten in XML, eine Speicherlösung für Modellrepräsentationen sowie ein Retrieval-Konzept

prototypical implementations

In this technical report, we present prototypical implementations of innovative tools and methods developed according to the working plan outlined in Technical Report TR-B-09-05 [23]. We present an ontology modularization and integration framework and the SVoNt server, the server-side end of an SVN- based versioning system for ontologies in the Corporate Ontology Engineering pillar. For the Corporate Semantic Collaboration pillar, we present the prototypical implementation of a light-weight ontology editor for non-experts and an ontology based expert finder system. For the Corporate Semantic Search pillar, we present a prototype for algorithmic extraction of relations in folksonomies, a tool for trend detection using a semantic analyzer, a tool for automatic classification of web documents using Hidden Markov models, a personalized semantic recommender for multimedia content, and a semantic search assistant developed in co-operation with the Museumsportal Berlin. The prototypes complete the next milestone on the path to an integral Cor- porate Semantic Web architecture based on the three pillars Corporate Ontol- ogy Engineering, Corporate Semantic Collaboration, and Corporate Semantic Search, as envisioned in [23]